Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Seven Poor Travellers: "The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again."
    The Seven Poor Travellers: "The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again."
    The Seven Poor Travellers: "The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again."
    Ebook48 pages41 minutes

    The Seven Poor Travellers: "The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again."

    By Charles Dickens

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Seven Poor Travellers is one of Charles Dickens’s Christmas stories that was first published in the 1854 Christmas issue of the Victorian Novelist’s periodical Household Words. It follows the adventures of six travelers in addition to the story of the seventh traveller who is none but the narrator himself. The narrative is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter entitled “In the Old City of Rochester,” the seven heroes meet at the old Richard Watts’s Charity and start telling stories to each other on a Christmas dinner. In the second and most important chapter entitled “The Story of Richard Doubledick,” the narrator entertains his companions by telling a story within a story whose hero is a strange twenty-two-year-old man who comes to Rochester to fall in love, enlist in the military and become the most “dissipated and reckless soldier in Chatham Barracks.” The final chapter of the booklet is entitled “The Road.” It speaks about the narrator’s journey home the following morning as each of the seven travellers goes his own way. Dickens’s conclusion of the story is skillfully woven in a way to let the readers long for more Christmas dinners and for more Christmas stories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781780006420
    The Seven Poor Travellers: "The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again."
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.

    Read more from Charles Dickens

    Related to The Seven Poor Travellers

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Sacred And The Profane

      Mar 28, 2024

      The Sacred And The Profane
      3 min read

    • Article

      Tom Cunliffe

      Aug 7, 2020

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Tom Cunliffe

      Aug 7, 2020

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Air Rights

      Nov 1, 2020

      The French Church—never much on looks, red brick leaningin the direction of Romanesque—settled into modest circumstanceshow many decades on West 16th?Nothing divine in the details,veneer peeling from doors nevermeant for here, never open. No light,ev

      4 min read

    • Article

      LASTING Impressions

      Feb 17, 2020

      LASTING Impressions
      4 min read

    • Article

      Worship On High

      Oct 18, 2021

      Worship On High
      5 min read

    • Article

      Welcome, Travelers

      Sep 1, 2019

      Welcome, Travelers
      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘Bowlaway’: Featured Fiction from Elizabeth McCracken

      Feb 4, 2019

      What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed. The post ‘Bowlaway’: Featured Fiction from Elizabeth McCracken appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      Restaurants

      Dec 13, 2023

      I've won an argument. At last. The only way to travel into the West End of an evening is by tube. For years, I've been losing this argument while watching angry high heels clatter down the escalator as if entering purgatory, while ranting that ‘It's

      2 min read

    • Article

      Heart Of The Home

      Jun 3, 2021

      Somewhere in North Carolina is a very large house once owned by a very wealthy man whose name I forget. Perhaps you’ve been there. It’s a large house with many corridors, and you pay money to walk through them. The original residents are long dead, b

      3 min read

    • Article

      “The Old Ones Are The Best…”

      Dec 1, 2022

      When the festive season rolls round and Slade vocalist Noddy Holder for the umpteenth time barks “Does your granny always tell ya, that the old songs are the best” from his band’s 1973 hit Merry Xmas Everybody, I like to paraphrase such lyrics and ap

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Ultimate Thermette?

      Aug 8, 2022

      The Ultimate Thermette?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Faith Healing

      Jun 19, 2023

      Faith Healing
      3 min read

    • Article

      Your Letters

      Dec 8, 2023

      It was great to see in the Nov/Dec edition [Vol 91 Issue 6] the article about the craftspeople who look after, conserve and restore our ancient buildings and landscapes. If it were not for the organisations who employ and train these people, these an

      2 min read

    • Article

      Competition

      Aug 25, 2021

      IN COMPETITION No 270, you were invited to write a poem called The Hall. Heather Oxley began, ‘Our halls are gateways to our outside selves.’ John Oldershaw’s narrator started in medias res: ‘“It’s the hall that sells the house!”/ Said Mr Valentine,

      2 min read

    • Article

      Trading In Tragedy

      Jul 28, 2020

      Trading In Tragedy
      5 min read

    • Article

      It Had To Be Stew

      May 22, 2022

      It Had To Be Stew
      4 min read

    • Article

      My Interiors Life: Weaned On The Small Screen

      Nov 25, 2021

      FOR ME, IT WAS ALL DOWN TO what I saw on the box (which was a lot) — and this extended too to the arenas of action: a fantastic littering of such beautiful and extraordinary interiors, not one of which had I ever set foot in, nor even so much as glim

      9 min read

    • Article

      Readers’ Letters

      Jun 28, 2023

      Readers’ Letters
      6 min read

    • Article

      Sentimental Sounds

      Nov 1, 2022

      Sentimental Sounds
      3 min read

    • Article

      Young Hearts…

      Oct 24, 2017

      Young Hearts…
      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Seven Poor Travellers

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Seven Poor Travellers - Charles Dickens

      THE SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS

      IN THREE CHAPTERS

      By CHARLES DICKENS

      Index Of Contents

      The Seven Poor Travellers

      Charles Dickens – A Biography

      CHAPTER I—IN THE OLD CITY OF ROCHESTER

      Strictly speaking, there were only six Poor Travellers; but, being a Traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be, I brought the number up to seven.  This word of explanation is due at once, for what says the inscription over the quaint old door?

      RICHARD WATTS, Esq.

      by his Will, dated 22 Aug. 1579,

      founded this Charity for Six poor Travellers,

      who not being ROGUES, or PROCTORS,

      May receive gratis for one Night, Lodging,

      Entertainment, and Fourpence each.

      It was in the ancient little city of Rochester in Kent, of all the good days in the year upon a Christmas-eve, that I stood reading this inscription over the quaint old door in question.  I had been wandering about the neighbouring Cathedral, and had seen the tomb of Richard Watts, with the effigy of worthy Master Richard starting out of it like a ship’s figure-head; and I had felt that I could do no less, as I gave the Verger his fee, than inquire the way to Watts’s Charity.  The way being very short and very plain, I had come prosperously to the inscription and the quaint old door.

      Now, said I to myself, as I looked at the knocker, I know I am not a Proctor; I wonder whether I am a Rogue!

      Upon the whole, though Conscience reproduced two or three pretty faces which might have had smaller attraction for a moral Goliath than they had had for me, who am but a Tom Thumb in that way, I came to the conclusion that I was not a Rogue.  So, beginning to regard the establishment as in some sort my property, bequeathed to me and divers co-legatees, share and share alike, by the Worshipful Master Richard Watts, I stepped backward into the road to survey my inheritance.

      I found it to be a clean white house, of a staid and venerable air, with the quaint old door already three times mentioned (an arched door), choice little long low lattice-windows, and a roof of three gables.  The silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables, with old beams and timbers carved into strange faces.  It is oddly garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave red-brick building, as if Time carried on business there, and hung out his sign.  Sooth to say, he did an active stroke of work in Rochester, in the old days of the Romans, and the Saxons, and the Normans; and down to the times of King John, when the rugged castle—I will not undertake to say how many hundreds of years old then—was abandoned to the centuries of weather which have so defaced the dark apertures in its walls, that the ruin looks as if the rooks and daws had pecked its eyes out.

      I was very well pleased, both with my property and its situation.  While I was yet surveying it with growing content, I espied, at one of the upper lattices which stood open, a decent body, of a wholesome matronly appearance, whose eyes I caught inquiringly addressed to mine.  They said so plainly, Do you wish to see the house? that I answered aloud, Yes, if you please.  And within a minute the old door opened, and I

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1